Fantasy and Medieval Iconography in The Last Unicorn
Fantasy and Medieval Iconography in The Last Unicorn

The fantasy genre has deep connections with medieval and pre-medieval iconography. J.R. Tolkien, an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon literature and English literature and language, is often credited as being the father of modern fantasy (also called “high fantasy”). His novels, The Hobbit (1954) and The Lord of the Rings (1954- 1955), set the stage for later mid-century fantasy works such as Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968). Both Tolkien and Beagle included elements found in pre-medieval and medieval iconography, from the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit to the creatures in Mommy Fortuna’s Midnight Carnival from The Last Unicorn, which included a satyr, a manticore, a Midgard serpent and a harpy.

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EDITORIALNoelle TaberhamADAPTATION, MEDIEVAL, ICONOGRAPHY, RELIGION, HISTORY Comments
One Hundred and One Dada-lmations
One Hundred and One Dada-lmations

For nearly 100 years, the name Walt Disney has been synonymous with top class, polished, and popular animation. Teams of animators churn out major films every couple of years, often to great financial success, and usually with a very particular ‘Disney-esque’ style. Timothy White purports that this style is, at least partly, typified by an attempted realism and continuity editing, typically associated with “Hollywood” cinema (1992: 3-16), meanwhile Paul Wells similarly ascribes a “mimetic” quality to Disney’s style, describing it as “orthodox” (2003: 220).

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EDITORIALJacqui GriffinDISNEY, SURREALISM, ABSTRACT, EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATIONComment
Fostering Empathy and Compassion through Fantasy/Animation
Fostering Empathy and Compassion through Fantasy/Animation

During the production of my animated film Anna, I began to contemplate questions about the intersection between empathy, animation and fantasy, and how they feed into the value of storytelling through film. The further into production I went, the more interesting and complex this became as I saw how fantasy and storytelling could play a powerful role in developing empathetic sensitivities in both filmmakers and viewers.

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CREATIVE REFLECTIONJess MountfieldCREATIVE PRACTICE, FILMMAKING, EMPATHY, EMOTIONComment
A million fanboys suddenly cried out in horror: Star Wars’ Hidden Virtues and the Fandom Menace
A million fanboys suddenly cried out in horror: Star Wars’ Hidden Virtues and the Fandom Menace

Commenting on the fan/ critic division of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977), Todd Berliner (2017) observes that: The original Star Wars (1977) has become one of the most widely and intensely loved movies of all time. Film scholars, however, lambasted Star Wars for its simplicity. Peter Lev calls it one of the “simple, optimistic genre films in the late 1970s.” David Cook says it privileges “a juvenile mythos.” Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the movie mostly “fireworks and pinball machines,” a deliberately silly film that offers only “narcissistic pleasures.”

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EDITORIALPaul TaberhamFANDOM, FAN STUDIES, STAR WARS, FRANCHISE, HOLLYWOOD, SCIENCE-FICTIONComment
Animating Truth: Documentary and Visual Culture in the 21st Century
Animating Truth: Documentary and Visual Culture in the 21st Century

In today’s visual culture, animation is at an interesting turning point, poised between fiction and fact, perhaps combining the two. We are increasingly confronted with ubiquitous animated images, videos, and gifs, for example, on smartphones, computers, in airplanes, doctors’ offices, schools, and many more, which are all used uncritically to represent or express real events, feelings, processes, and interactions.

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EDITORIALNea EhrlichDOCUMENTARY, TRUTH, POLITICAL, VISUALISATIONComment
Contagion Animation as Contagious Animation
Contagion Animation as Contagious Animation

There is no accounting for taste at the best of times, but this past month’s constant stream of dire global pandemic news and projections has wreaked havoc on streaming algorithms, as quarantined audiences scramble to keep themselves occupied with a wide variety of new content. While many have opted to dive headfirst into big cat-themed true crime, others are eschewing escapist entertainment in favor of a morbid fascination with newly relevant fictional contagion narratives.

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EDITORIALMihaela MihailovaANIMATION, NEWS, REPRESENTATION, VISIBILITY, POLITICALComment
"The biggest star in the world": re-animating the king in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)
"The biggest star in the world": re-animating the king in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) was the thirty-fifth feature to star the giant kaiju (the Japanese word generally used to refer to giant movie monsters). Although it was the latest in a series of films spanning 65 years, it was only the fourth time that “the Big G” had appeared as a fully digitally animated creature, discounting the anime series on Netflix (2017/8).

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EDITORIALSteven RawleMONSTERS, SPECIAL EFFECTS, DIGITAL, CGI, REMAKE, REBOOTComment
"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy/animation?" Music, Mimicry and Multitudes in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Rocketman (2019)
"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy/animation?" Music, Mimicry and Multitudes in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Rocketman (2019)

Two recent big screen biopics released within a few months of each other between October 2018 and May 2019 offered notably contrasting portrayals of popular musical icons. But if the lukewarm critical reception surrounding recent Freddie Mercury/Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (Bryan Singer, 2018) put the genre under scrutiny for its questionable re-appropriation of real-life, then Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher, 2019) seemed remarkably immune to such criticisms.

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EDITORIALChristopher HollidayFANTASY, BIOPIC, CGI, SPECIAL EFFECTS, ANIMATIONComment
Review: Liam Burke, The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre (2015)
Review: Liam Burke, The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre (2015)

The awarding of the Golden Lion to Todd Philips’ Joker (2019) at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 illustrates the overwhelming significance of comic book material and its characters for the contemporary Hollywood film industry. Telling the origin story of Joker, Batman’s nemesis, through the development of a violent, nihilistic character, Joker subverts the heroic expectations we might expect from a perceived comic book film.

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BOOK REVIEWMaria O'BrienADAPTATION, COMIC BOOK, FIDELITY, SUPERHEROComment
Poetic Fantasies of Time and Space: From the Eyes of an Old Dog
Poetic Fantasies of Time and Space: From the Eyes of an Old Dog

In Sylvain Chomet’s first animated feature film, The Triplets of Belleville (2003) there is a key scene in which the main event simply concerns the barking of a dog out of the window at a passing train. This scene, which is going to be explored here in this sequence analysis, connects the childhood of Champion, the film’s main character, to the present time (of the film’s narrative, which takes place around 1950s), when we meet him as a young cycling athlete training for Tour du France, accompanied by his ever present, loving and supportive grandmother Madame Souza.

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SEQUENCE ANALYSISFatemeh Hosseini-ShakibSTYLE, FRANCE, AESTHETICS, ANIMALS, MUSICAL, MUSICComment
Review: Cartoon Animation - Satire and Subversion
Review: Cartoon Animation - Satire and Subversion

The University of the Creative Arts (UCA) in Farnham, UK, was the setting for a recent one-day interdisciplinary symposium that confronted the irreverence and subversive potential of caricature and cartoons, pitting together multiple forms of animation with alternate modes of printed and graphic communication to illuminate the power of political (and politicised) pictures.

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EVENT REVIEWChristopher HollidayCARTOON, SATIRE, SUBVERSION, ANIMATION, BRITISHComment
The Multiverse of Animation
The Multiverse of Animation

A scientific experiment goes awry and rips a hole in the fabric of reality. It is a gateway to a parallel universe, similar to our own in some ways, yet vastly different in others. The concept of alternate universes coexisting within a broader multiverse has been a staple of science fiction and fantasy since Michael Moorcock first adopted the trope in his 1963 novella The Sundered Worlds. A fictional multiverse opens up an extraordinary range of new possibilities for creative storytelling, unconstrained by a single world’s established history or even its laws of reality. It is that malleability that makes multiverses the perfect narrative framework for a crossover story.

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EDITORIALStanyo ZhelevTELEVISION, CROSSOVER, MULTIVERSE, ONTOLOGYComment
Incredibles 2 and Pixar’s “intensified mise-en-scène”
Incredibles 2 and Pixar’s “intensified mise-en-scène”

My contribution to this blog will stress the animated more than the fantastical because I am here more concerned with the resemblance certain animated films – specifically Pixar’s CG animated features – possess to the solidity and concreteness of the so called “classical” style of live action cinema.

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SEQUENCE ANALYSISTom BrownHOLLYWOOD, ANIMATION, PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS, FRAMING, MISE EN SCÈNEComment
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Joachim Rønning, 2019) and the Construction of Fantasy Spaces
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Joachim Rønning, 2019) and the Construction of Fantasy Spaces

The Walt Disney Company does not have the best record when it comes to diverse ethnic and racial representation. Despite spending the latter half of the last decade trying to rectify this problem across its Disney, Pixar, and Marvel Studio offerings, attempts to broaden on-screen representation still leaves both audiences and critics wanting.

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EDITORIALMichelle Anya AnjirbagDISNEY, SPECIAL EFFECTS, RACE, REMAKE, FANTASYComment
Review: Todd James Pierce, The Life and Times of Ward Kimball: Maverick of Disney Animation (2019)
Review: Todd James Pierce, The Life and Times of Ward Kimball: Maverick of Disney Animation (2019)

Despite working at the Walt Disney studios during the Golden Age of American animation, Ward Kimball is in some ways an odd choice of subject for a biography. The animator worked mostly behind the scenes, never directed a feature film, most of his work on famous films was cut, and he was never a household name in his own lifetime. On the other hand, he is as fascinating a subject as a biographer could hope for: a talented, creative craftsman, an eccentric who built a stretch of railroad and drove a steam train around his suburban backyard, and a skilled musician who played trombone in a long-running Dixieland jazz band.

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BOOK REVIEWJohn A. RileyDISNEY, CREATIVE PRACTICE, HOLLYWOOD, INDUSTRY, CARTOONComment
Annihilation (2018) and Anthropocene Effects
Annihilation (2018) and Anthropocene Effects

What does animation when utilised in cinema have to do with the Anthropocene? This term emerged in the scientific community at the turn of the millennium as a way of categorically establishing the impact of humans (or Anthropos) on Earth by naming the current geological era after them. I seek here in this blog post to think about the relationship between special effects and a geological era characterised by human activity on Earth – global warming, the sixth mass extinction, mass migration.

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EDITORIALJoseph JennerANTHROPOCENE, TELEVISION, SPECIAL EFFECTS, COMPUTER ANIMATION Comments
Annihilation (2018): Animating the (non)human of the Anthropocene
Annihilation (2018): Animating the (non)human of the Anthropocene

Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018), a science fiction film set in the present day, stands out as a compelling example of fantasy/animation through its representation of chimerical monstrous creatures. The film contains uncanny imaginings of alligator-shark hybrids, skull-faced bears that growl with human voices and flower patches spectrally arranged in the shape of the human body.

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EDITORIALToby NeilsonANIMATION, ANTHROPOCENE, SCIENCE-FICTION, MONSTERS, ENVIRONMENTComment